Apple Execs Sold Off $143 Million of Stock Before iPhone 6 Launch

Apple execs, including Tim Cook, sold off a total of $143 million (£87.7m) of stock in the days leading up to the iPhone 6 launch, which, totally coincidentally, was right when Apple stock was at an all-time high.

The dump was part of a scheduled stock sale, a mechanism whereby people with 'insider knowledge' of a trade (normally, company executives) can nonetheless trade stock, by having the trade planned at an earlier date, before the executives have any substantial insider knowledge.

As such, these trades may well have been planned back in January, or even earlier, making them legally sound. But the timing probably isn't a total coincidence: Apple stock tends to peak right around new-product time, thanks to the hype surrounding a new reveal, and then fall immediately after, especially if, say, Apple's new watch won't be released for six months or so.

The moral ramifications won't matter much to Apple's execs, though, since they're now sitting pretty on a new pile of cash: $35 million (£21.4m) apiece for Cook, VP Marketing Phil Schiller, VP Operations Jeffrey Williams, and General Counsel Bruce Sewell, while Apple's poor CFO, Luca Maestri, only netted himself $1.6 million (£981,000). [Barrons via CultofMac]